Instruction manual

IG7 Page 22
EXPERIMENTS
On a personal note; back when I was in Junior High School, I really wished
kits like this were available. I always loved tinkering with high voltage and see-
ing the strange phenomenon associated with high voltage and high power.
Maybe this was a fixation with fire... or maybe something else (Froyd could
better answer than I can). I used to have to dig around in old television sets
looking for flyback transformers and high voltage diodes, praying that when I
found one, it wasn’t the reason why the TV was by the curb. I don’t even want
to mention how much I had to pay out of pocket for high voltage diodes and
capacitors! Now I have gathered all of the pieces together in a reputable kit
that actually has a warranty, imagine that! Life is so easy now.
I actually found this little gem of a high voltage power supply while working
on another high voltage kit, the PG13. A nice company in Taiwan specializes
in high voltage power supplies and they sent this item along for us to play
with. Oh boy this is a neat little supply, much better than those $4.00 versions
you see in some electronics surplus catalogs! Here is a quick message they
sent me about the difference:
“* There is other ion generator in the market similar to ours and the unit
price is approx. USD3.- , it is AC110V, pulse type, the output power is less
than 1/6 of ours, the output voltage will vary with discharge devices and the
output voltage is un-adjustable also can not meet EMI regulation.”
(Pardon their English, you should see my Taiwanese! They’re doing well!!)
Thus why ours is a bit more expensive. In fact when I was initially playing
with the power supply I was quite impressed by how well is worked, the con-
sistent corona it produced, and how easy it is to use. It was originally designed
for car air filter use hence the reason why it runs on +12V. Because of this
however, you can isolate the power supplies from one another and so some
pretty interesting stuff. I will leave that up to you to play with.
Our first experiment of course is the kit we just put together, the Ion Cannon.
The idea of the ion cannon is to be able to disperse ions into the air efficiently
and with relatively low voltages (less than 10 kV). This little project shows
many properties of ions that will help you understand how they work and show
many neat scientific principles of ions, ion wind and more.